The Power of a Google Searchable Brand

In this video, we are going to talk to you about the power of building a brand on Google that is searchable. This is one that you're going to need to have a pen and paper on because myself diamond from ICND and Conrad from Build Up Bookings share with you a tip each that we wanted to give to you on number one, the power of Google. The power of Google, My business power of a Google profile. Then we talked about how it is so important to build a searchable business. And then once we've gone through that, I brought into your referrals.

All right.

Okay. So thank you very much for doing this, Diamond. If you could just please spend a couple of minutes just introducing yourself ICND and how you came to working there and all the things in between.

Okay, sure. Great. Thanks for having me today. Always lovely to see you and Conrad happy to do this call with the three of us. So I'm Diamond Fransen from Intercoastal Net Designs, or we shorten it to icnd. We are a vacation rental website designer and digital marketing agency based out of Ocean Isle, North Carolina. We're independently owned. We've been independently owned by Brandon Salz for 24 years. We have close to 50 employees now and some of them are on our web design side and others are on our marketing side as well. So where I fit into that puzzle is being iCND's brand manager. I work all of our partnerships with partners. Like here I have on the screen with you two, our PMS partners and every kind of all the partners in between. Also promoting ICD's brand itself and getting our crew and our staff ready to visit all the conventions. Like we have staff out today in Kansas City at the VRME Spring Forum. So shout out to all those guys and girls out there. But definitely coming to ICND was I moved from New Jersey to South Carolina and I was recommended by a friend. So referrals at its best, you know, to not only find new places but also find employment as well. So happy to be here today. I'm just going to really focus on Google Business Profile or as formerly known Google Business, Google my business. And for vacation rental managers, this is, you know, focus. This is eligible for property, vacation homes that are part of an agency or vacation rental manager. You know, these aren't for those singular properties that are just out there, just kind of starting from, you know, singular home. These are services that, you know, are linked to a service, a vacation rental manager service. You know, I see these vacation rental managers coming in to ICND and one of the first things I, I look at is their Google my business, their Google business profile, you know, are they set up? Are they optimized? Are, are they even in the right industry category? And I think those are the one things, those, you know, the first things I always kind of steer people to go look at, you know, do you have the right industry, you know, set up? You know, you may have a vacation rental managing company, but do you have maybe real estate? You know, is that an option that you can either add or take away if that's not what you, you know, you're doing setting up your industry? Correct. Industry is always important. And then look at your hours. So I don't know if a lot of vacation rental managers understand this or know this, but you could have operational hours for your physical building or storefront, but also your service hours. So that's, I find that something that people miss. If you have 24 hour maintenance service or you have 24 hour call in reservation service, you can set that up as a subset of your business hours and have those there so people can see them. Physical address really important, especially for people coming in from out of town that need to pick up, you know, a key or something at the office or, or go there for, you know, pick up, maybe they're getting a package delivered there, having that physical address and beyond most what some of my most important tips I always give is keep those photos updated. You know, I know driving into a new area, not familiar, don't know where to go to maybe get like I said, a key or a package or something. And having a picture of your building in your Google business profile is paramount Because I'm like, you can do the 360 view, you can see like look for other landmarks to know where you're going. Because at the end of your trip, if you've traveled a long time, you're tired and you just want to get to where you need to be to get to your vacation rental. You know, photos like I just said are very important, having those realistic photos of what's going on. And one of the most underutilized I think option that I see is the posts. So posts are something that you can do very similar to a social media post. But this post you can link out to one of your website pages that talks about specials or events happening in your area if you have them. So you can link your Google my business post to a page on your website. They do expire after some time, so you do have to go back in and update them frequently. Especially if you're doing a post about specials, but utilizing the post option I think is really important. And then checking all your amenities, you know, making sure that especially if you're a condo or a hotel, if you're in that business category, having all your amenities checks is also something to just go in, make sure they're up to date because they help you optimize your global business profile for sure.

So, Conrad, do you have any questions or any, any sort of thing to add to that for. For diamond before I go on with mine?

Yeah. I think I'm always curious too about maybe a step before what diamond was saying. Everything she said made a lot of sense to me. The only thing I would maybe consider adding on is like reviews. I don't know if you touched on that piece, but like having a lot of reviews obviously is good. Having a lot of good reviews is even better. Right. With respect to, you know, I've done brand searches before. I'm sure you have as well. Both of you as well. And you go look and they have like a 3.7 out of 5 stars on Google. And that's like red flags, like alarm bells ringing, like what is going on with this company? Right. And actually use it as a vetting tool for myself on my side of things. So I go look at someone as a consumer, you know, considering booking a place. I'll go look at their reviews on Google and consider if I think this is a place I might want to stay or give my money to. And I know that, you know, consumers, guests think the same way. So reviews maybe would be one piece I'd slide in there. You know, stimulating reviews is not the most easy thing to do in the world. But a lot of it is just like asking, like asking your best guests. A lot of our clients have it in, like their post departure out communication, hey, leave us a review if you had a good experience, that sort of thing. So I'd say that and then the piece that I would say, we, you know, if we go one step above that, it would be why someone's searching for the actual name of the company in the first place. So the piece that I think is actually really important is brand. Like having a unique brand that people actually want to look for and search for and seek out. That's actually one of the most valuable things that I think you can do because whether you have one property or ten or one hundred or a thousand, the best thing for people to have is at least something to look for that's unique to you. If you call your Property, the beach house. And it's the same the beach house as in 5,000 other places all around the world. Never mind. Just even your market, I think you're really going to struggle to actually generate people finding you specifically based on a platform search on Airbnb or VRBO or something like that. So my logic would be that if you can get people actually look for your company, that's the best thing in the world because then they've narrowed down the options of every host in the market, even to a professional manager, to just you specifically. And that would apply in my mind, whether you're a single property host, what I call a pro host, who maybe has multiple listings, or whether you're a property manager and you manage for other people. So that would be. My logic is, well, how can we tie the brand in so people look and find the Google my business in the first place, you know, to diamonds from Diamond's Point from a second ago. And then what would make them actually want to stay with me? What do I offer that other people don't? And that's maybe something that, you know, you'd want to dig into and see how you can grow further for sure. My experience with that Mark, is that you basically need like, if you read the terms of service and the terms of conditions, that's on the allowed list on Google, you basically need an office. I mean, that's basically what you need. So in theory, I actually have a client that I work with that has like two properties, but he actually has a legitimate verified Google, my business profile set up because he has a coworking space. And then he actually has like a sign even on that coworking space, like name a property manager. So there's little workarounds that are like following all the rules. And you know, Google shouldn't take you down where you have like signage, et cetera, but it basically has to be an office. That's basically what needs to be verified on that side of things on Google. My business. My business. Yeah.

And obviously Google Vacation Rentals is starting to pick up a bit of heat now. There's more property management software tools that are synced into the Google Vacation rental program. And obviously that's the easiest way to get listed on Google Vacation Rental at the, at the moment. But I love that little hack that he did. He added in a little co working space on the property.

Yeah, you have to have, you know, a postcard mailed to the physical elite location. So that is, you know, that is a workaround for sure.

Yeah. The way I see that though, Mark, is this to me is an and not an or so it's not Google my business or Google Vacation Rentals. I think in a perfect world it's. And if you have the means and capability of doing so, yeah, Google Vacation Rentals is probably where they're going to keep pushing most likely. We'll see. Because it doesn't seem like they've been quick on the uptake to monetize that product really aggressively. I was wrong. Like if you asked me two years ago, I would have said, oh yeah, Google is going to have Google Vacation Rentals and then they're going to do what they've done with hotels where it's going to be like commission based or you're going to have to do like hotel price ads and actually bid on, you know, your property or your properties to show up on that block and show hire. That hasn't been the case yet. At least with the clients that we work with, they're listed in there. But it's just a matter of time, right? Google's going to monetize every Surface they can as long as they don't get antitrust at first. Right. They're going to figure out ways to do that. So I think the good part is for some people that 60% maybe you mentioned a moment ago, Mark, perhaps they're out of luck. They may really not be able to go down this path that Diamond's talking about. They may just not have the ability to do so and follow the terms of service. But for the people that can, obviously every. Everything I think we talked about here is pretty valid. But the Google Vacation Rental I think is an and if you can do both, fantastic. If you're only eligible for one and you can do it the right way, I think you're definitely on the right path there for sure.

But yeah, thank you so much. I really enjoyed this. My, my idea when I came up with this podcast episode was just to bring together two people that I love to follow. I love the podcast love just come together and just talk marketing for an hour which we have done so and we've been able to tie it all nicely together where I feel like we've laid a foundation of, of what every single host property management company, short term rental, whatever you niche you want to put yourself in this world of hospitality should be doing to making sure that guests can easily find them and book around, which is what we all want to do. So thank you so much. Thank you for tuning in and we'll be back together very soon in a few days with another episode episode that's coming out. So thank you very much, and we'll see you all very soon. Having a blast.

Gonna get it on the Bruce Lee podcast. Bruce Lee, like Bruce Lee? Cause it's so hard on the T is loose leaf making up those rhymes. Don't write it, just do it loosely.